More British women in 'high status' professions than men, finds study

Women now outnumber men in the most high status professions after a "quiet
revolution in the workplace", according to a Cambridge University
study.

By Martin Beckford, Social Affairs Correspondent

7:00AM BST 11 Aug 2009

The report claims that there are now more female lawyers, doctors and architects than male ones in Britain as a result of better education and a decline in the overall number of menial jobs.

However, although more women now have high status occupations, they are still paid less than men and are less likely to be found in senior positions.

Dr Robert Blackburn, Emeritus Reader in Sociology and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, said: "The findings are very important, but not widely recognised until now. A quiet revolution in the workplace means that the widespread idea that women do the low status jobs is now wrong – in fact they are more likely to be found working in the sorts of occupations that both men and women think are higher up the social scale.

"There was not always this advantage to women; it is part of a significant change in industrialised societies in the last 50 years."

For his paper, called Gender Inequality at Work in Industrial Countries, Dr Blackburn and colleagues looked at official censuses and labour force surveys in 10 European countries including the UK to see where women and men were working and what they earned.

He focused on 200 occupations whose social status has been rated using a scale called the Cambridge Social Interaction and Stratification Scale (CAMSIS).

This ranks jobs according to how interesting and desirable they appear to others, and how much autonomy the worker is believed to have. It places the professions – such as law, medicine and architecture – at the top of the scale along with managers and scientists.

The figures show that the British workplace is relatively "segregated" in that women and men generally do different jobs.

Men earn more than women, with the Women and Work Commission claiming last month that the gender pay gap widened to 22.6 per cent last year.

This is partly because men tend to be employed in more senior positions such as company directors, but also because they do more dangerous or physically demanding work.

Overall, however, the new research found there are now more women in occupations that are seen as prestigious.

The difference in the UK was found to be "statistically significant" but smaller than in other countries headed by Russia and Sweden.

Dr Blackburn said part of the change was down to the fact that women are more likely to go on to university now than in previous generations.

But he said the main reason is the changing face of occupations available as the number of low-skilled jobs for women in developed countries - such as domestic service roles - has declined, while the number of office jobs and professional roles has risen.

"Formerly women were more likely than men to be in manual occupations, but as manual work has declined, it is predominantly women who have moved into non-manual jobs, so that now it is men who are more likely than women to be manual workers," he said.

"Initially, in the change from manual to non-manual work, women tended to be employed in low-level non-manual occupations, especially clerical work. More recently, they have contributed to the expansion of professional employment."

Dr Blackburn is to present his findings at a seminar next month and then submit them to peer-reviewed journals.